Ian Kelly at the Duncan Showroom

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Wednesday, April 29th, 2015
8:00 PM

Montreal singer/songwriter Ian Kelly performs at the Duncan Showroom on April 29.

Tickets are available in advance for $12 at www.showroomproductions.ca/buy-tickets and for $15 at the door.

It’s hard to get a read on Ian Kelly. And that, if you didn’t already guess, is a good thing. But let’s give it the old college try.

First-off, you might say that he’s the big guy with that unique voice – an unusual fellow who makes music that you can’t quite pigeonhole. It takes a while but eventually the intriguing arrangements, lyrics that stick with you and compelling melodies win you over. That’s what happened with his previous album Speak Your Mind. It was a real slow-burner, continuing to shift units more than two years after its release, going gold in Canada -– marking 40,000 copies sold -– just weeks before the launch of his brand-new third album, Diamonds & Plastic.

Ian has always done it his way. He’s from Montreal’s west end, with an anglo mom and a franco dad, but he grew up mostly en français, yet – just to keep us a little off-balance – he’s always written and performed in the language of Dylan. He says that’s just the way the songs come out. If you know Ian at all, you know full well the language choice was anything but a careerist move.

To muddy the waters further, he was actually born Ian Couture but took his mom’s last name early-on when he learned there was another singer sporting the same name. He started playing music as a teenager on his older brother's drums and quickly moved to belting out Pearl Jam chestnuts with his first band, Jim Bob and the flying chickens. A few years later, now out of school and working as a soundtech at Spectrum in Montreal, he bought a computer and started doing his own home recordings, a do-it-yourself approach that he’s never truly abandoned. He learned to play a bunch of instruments, not that he claims to be all that great on any of them, and he wrote, recorded and produced his first album, Insecurity, entirely at home on his own, playing every note on the disc.

Once he did that, he figured he might as well put it out himself, on his own label, appropriately named Me, Myself and I Music. The first proverbial big break came one night at Théâtre St. Denis when Ian was working on the local sound crew at an Alanis Morissette show. They were short an opening act and Ian volunteered. Soon enough, he was on stage and he suddenly realized – ‘Hey I can entertain 2,500 people. Maybe there’s a full-time gig for me in this biz.’  More at http://www.iankellysmusic.com